Mikhail Moiseyevich Botvinnik – hundredth anniversary

8/17/2011 – Mikhail Moiseyevich Botvinnik was born on August 17, 1911, and died in 1995, at the age of 84. He was the first world-class player to develop within the Soviet Union, winning the World Championship three times, while working as an electrical engineer, and in fact earning a PhD. The latter part of his life was devoted to his chess school for young talents – and to chess programming. Portrait.

Mikhail Botvinnik

Mikhail Moiseyevich Botvinnik was born of Jewish parents on August 17, 1911,
in Kuokkala, Grand Duchy of Finland (which at the time was part of the Russian
Empire). He was the first world-class player to develop within the Soviet Union
(Alekhine was a top player before the Russian Revolution), putting him under
political pressure but also giving him considerable influence within Soviet
chess. He won the World Championship title three times, while working as an
electrical engineer, and in fact earning a PhD in 1951.

In
autumn 1923, at the age of twelve young Mikhail learnt chess from a school friend
of his older brother. He instantly fell in love with the game and a year later
won his school's championship. When he finished the school curriculum, he was
below the minimum age for the entrance examinations for higher education –
while waiting, he qualified for his first USSR Championship final stage in 1927
as the youngest player ever at that time, tied for fifth place and won the title
of National Master. The picture on the left is from that year.

In 1928 Botvinnik was admitted to the Leningrad University's Mathematics Department
and in the following year played for Leningrad in the student team chess championship
against Moscow. Leningrad won and the team manager secured Botvinnik a transfer
to the Polytechnic's Electromechanical Department, where he was one of only
four students who entered straight out of school. Later he married the daughter
of his algebra and geometry teacher, Gayane Davidovna, who was a student at
the Vaganova Academy of Russian Ballet in Leningrad and later, a ballerina in
the Bolshoi Theatre. They had one daughter named Olga, born in 1941.

Soviet championship

In
1931, at the age of 20, Botvinnik won his first Soviet Championship in Moscow,
and later that year graduated with a degree in Electrical Engineering, after
completing a practical assignment on temporary transmission lines at the Dnieper
Hydroelectric Station. In 1933 he repeated his Soviet Championship success,
and went on to win further Soviet Championship titles in 1939, 1944, 1945, and
1952, bringing his total to six – a record he shares with Mikhail Tal.

In his first tournament outside the USSR, Hastings 1934–35, Botvinnik
had a disappointing result (he only tied for 5th-6th places). Emanuel Lasker
told him that his arrival only two hours before the first round began had been
a serious mistake and that he should have allowed ten days for acclimatization.
Botvinnik said that he would never make that mistake again. In 1936 he was invited
to play in a tournament at Nottingham, England, where he took Lasker's advice
and arrived ten days before play started. His Soviet rivals forecast disaster
for him, but he finished in an undefeated shared first place (+6 =8) with Capablanca,
half a point ahead of current World Champion Max Euwe and rising American stars
Reuben Fine and Samuel Reshevsky, and one point ahead of ex-champion Alexander
Alekhine. It was the first tournament victory by a Soviet master outside his
own country.

World Championship

In 1939 a world championship match in Russia between the reigning champion
Alekhine and Botvinnik was agreed, but mainly due to the outbreak of the Second
World War it never took place. After Alekhine's death in 1946 a tournament with
the world's five strongest players was held in The Hague, in 1948, and it was
won convincingly by Botvinnik, with a score of 14/20, three points clear of
the field. This made Mikhail Botvinnik the sixth World Champion. He held the
title for the next fifteen years, with two brief interruptions, when he lost
the title to Vasily Smyslov and Mikhail Tal, regaining it each time in a rematch
one year later. Botvinnik played a total of seven world championship matches.

Mikhail Botvinnik [image provided by Edward Winter]

Smyslov, Bronstein, Keres and Botvinnik in 1954

After losing the world title for the final time, to Tigran Petrosian in Moscow
in 1963, Botvinnik withdrew from the following World Championship cycle after
FIDE declined to grant a losing champion the automatic right to a rematch. He
retired from competitive play in 1970, aged 59, preferring instead to occupy
himself with the development of computer chess programs and to assist with the
training of younger Soviet players, earning him the nickname of "Patriarch
of the Soviet Chess School".

The Botvinnik School for young talents later turned into the Botvinnik-Kasparov
school, with one of its most successful students carrying on the tradition.
In the above picture you can see some contemporary players taking part in one
of the sessions. [Garry Kasparov has just informed us that it took place in
Druskininkai, Lithuania, in August 1987 – he even described some of the
games he had played in a simul against these young talents]

In the 1950s Botvinnik became interested in computers, at first mainly for
playing chess, but he later also co-authored reports on the possible use of
artificial intelligence in managing the Soviet economy. In chess he championed
the "selective" approach in which the program was supposed to use
general chess principles to decide which moves were worth considering. This
method turned out to be a dead end, as computers were powerful enough by the
mid-1970s to outperform his selective Pioneer program, which never actually
played a game, by using a brute-force search (checking all possible moves).
In 1991 he was awarded an honorary degree in mathematics of the University of
Ferrara (Italy) for his work on computer chess.

Mikhail Botvinnik in 1994

Botvinnik died of pancreatic cancer in 1995. He remained active until the last
few months of his life, and continued to go to work despite blindness in one
of his eyes and extremely poor vision in the other.

Yuri Averbakh on Botvinnik

He is a contemporary of Botvinnik – Yuri Lvovich Averbakh, Russian
chess player and author, currently at 89 the oldest living chess grandmaster.
In an interview with the Russian magazine Sport Express Averbakh remembers his
great colleague, whom he had known for sixty years. We bring you excerpts.

I met Botvinnik In 1935, during the second International Chess Tournament
in Moscow. We were young lads, addicted to chess, and he was a great example
for us. In 1936, at summer camp, I remember how we ran to listen to the
radio and rejoiced when Botvinnik won his biggest tournament in Nottingham.
As a player I grew up almost simultaneously with the successes of Mikhail
Botvinnik.

My first game against him was in the Moscow Championship in 1943. I wrote
his name on my scoresheet and had to pinch myself: I was playing Botvinnik
one-on-one"! Mikhail Moiseevich had black and played the French Defence.
On move forty, after a number of exchanges, he offered a draw. He was very
polite about it, and asked me what I did apart from chess. I played him
twice in the USSR Championships, with one draw and one loss.

Botvinnik did not play in the first match USSA vs USA, which was held in
America, because he was tired from his match against Smyslov, but I think
also because he did not like flying. The second match was in Moscow, and
our training camp was near Botvinnik's dacha. He invited me to play some
training games against him, which I did. At the time I was the USSR champion.
He insisted we keep the radio on during the games, to learn how to avoid
distraction from noise. He also allowed his coach Ragozin to smoke during
training games, to prepare him for opponents who would do the same during
a match.

I played two matches against Botvinnik, the first in 1956, consisting of
six games. Five were drawn and I lost one. The next was over ten games in
1958. The total score was again plus one for my opponent. I believe this
second match played a negative role for his match against Smyslov. It cost
too much nerves.

In the beginning I was fascinated by the personality of Botvinnik. He was
always interesting and had his own original views on many things. But then
I found out that my objections to anything he said usually fell on deaf
ears. Basically it was a monolog, not a dialog – I was supposed to
listen and admire him.

After Botvinnik became World Champion in 1948 he decided to do his doctoral
thesis. He worked on it for three years, but those were three years lost
for his chess, and he lost the huge advantage he had. He ceased to be head
and shoulders above the others and was only first among equals.

We argued a lot about his computer program. I tried to convince him that
his mathematical training did not meet the requirements of the subject –
the science of cybernetics was developed after his education has been completed.
But he thought he could become an expert in cybernetics. Modern computer
scientists used a simple method of exhaustive search, in which the machine
does not think, it just calculates. Botvinnik wanted the machine to cut
off the options, just like a human in a practical game.

"100 years of Mikhail Botvinnik"

The 11th is the day of arrival and the blitz tournament (at 17:00h),
from August 12-20 the classical tournament will be held (Cup Russia) with
a prize fund of one million Rubles. The competitions will be held in the
Hilti Sport School.

See also

9/1/2011 – All the deepest plans or endgame technique are useless if you fall victim to a shot that leaves you in a lost position. Likewise, sometimes that superior play will only offer a single window of opportunity to deliver that final blow, so it is vital to be ready for it when it does. All the shots here were played by Botvinnik from the 1948 World Championship and beyond. Are you world champion material?Discuss

8/19/2011 – Former FIDE World Champion Rustam Kasimdzhanov recently proposed that there were too many draws in chess, and that eliminating them from top-level chess would greatly enhance the popularity of the game. After him GM Sergei Shipov made a similar proposal, involving tie-break rapid or blitz games to be played immediately after draws. Here a selection of reactions from our readers.Discuss

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